How to succeed in exploration without really discovering anything: four French travelers in colonial Louisiana, 1714–63

Abstract

Histories of colonial America in the last 20 years have emphasized European empires and the borderlands where empires confronted one another and the native peoples of the continent. The French colonies of New France and Louisiana did not truly control a vast territory however, only a chain of posts along major rivers. French Louisiana also never developed a profitable staple commodity such as sugar in the West Indies or pelts in New France. This article examines how four French Louisiana explorers – Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny, Jean-Baptiste Bénard de la Harpe, Etienne Veniard de Bourgmont, and Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz – nonetheless sustained metropolitan interest in the colony by delivering to Paris maps, exploration accounts, and Indian alliances that promised access to vast wealth in Spanish New Mexico or a route to the Pacific Ocean. The four men sensed that information was a commodity which could exceed the value of staple products or, perhaps more accurately, that one individual could amass greater capital in the form of information than in the form of physical commodities, by feeding the desires of and sustaining the myths held by metropolitan officials and investors. De la Harpe and Bourgmont succeeded in winning titles of nobility from the Crown in exchange for their maps and narratives, and retired comfortably in France. Dumont and Le Page were less successful. They offered their knowledge in exchange for investments in further exploration, but found no takers. By the 1750s, a more pastoral fantasy of agricultural fertility was replacing the mercantilist fantasy of gold and silver such as had been found in New Spain.